7 unorthodox ways SEO companies generate their own leads

As an SEO, trying to generate SEO leads isn’t as easy as you might think. Sure, you might be the top SEO in Delray Beach or wherever you are from, but on a national scale you might have 10 SEO companies just as good as you in every city in the USA.

A lot of these SEO companies have massive budgets for lead generation and aren’t afraid to spend it.

Control panel advertising

Its a smart move for an SEO company with the right budget to advertise inside a control panel such as Hostgator.

If you are staring at the backend of a cPanel window, there is a chance that you are in need of SEO.

Companies like Hostgator, Godaddy and more auction off or rather sell “icons” within cPanel or their version of a control panel to the highest bidder. Over the last 10 or so years I’ve seen a number of these companies come and go. The brilliant part about getting placement in what I call “control panel advertising” is that the icon almost appears as though it is part of the service itself. A built-in entity almost.

This icon almost appears as though it is part of the control panel, which is the beauty of control panel advertising.

Twitter advertising

Twitter advertising can be tricky, but can really pay off. Personally one of my favorite aspects of Twitter advertising is the demographic targeting. You can target followers of a certain person, certain niches, devices, and a dozen or so different settings.

You can also use Twitter lead-gen cards which is kind of like a promoted Tweet but with an embedded CTA within it.

Twitter advertising can dive leads, engagement, and a ton of interest to your site.

Footer advertising

Before I go any further I should say that if you are placing links in the footers of your client websites, you should always no-follow them. Occasionally we’ll drop a footer link in a client website if we are really proud of the work we’ve done, but we always no-follow them.

That said, you can see a lot of click through’s from footer links. People are always snooping the SERPs and trying to figure out who is ranked for what, and how they did it.

Depending on the site you can see anywhere from a few dozen to several thousands clicks per month from footer links.

Footer links: one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Mobile Click-to-call

Matt Cutts recently said that he expects mobile traffic to exceed desktop traffic in the very near future. With that in mind, an SEO company looking to grab new clients should not overlook mobile advertising on Google aka Adwords.

Google makes their click-to-call ads nice and pretty for searchers. With just a quick tap a mobile user can go from SERP to a phone call in mere seconds. Again, it is all about targeting the right demographic and the right keywords which can be a really overwhelming process with all of the targeting options in Adwords, but it is definitely worth it.

When Google rolled out click-to-call it was a huge win for SEO’s who wanted to generate quick leads.

Reddit advertising

You really gotta watch it with this one, because if you advertise the wrong thing on the wrong subreddit, it could backfire immensely.

Remember that Reddit users are extremely sharp, extremely skeptical, and very well in-tune with the overall internet climate. While I haven’t seen any SEO companies advertising on Reddit that is not to say that it doesn’t happen already.

Reddit advertising

Offline advertising

Back in the day, well actually only about 4 years ago I would do anything and everything to get our phone to ring. I used to drive around in my car and post photocopied flyers in businesses, supermarkets, schools, telephone poles, bus stops, business complexes, and everywhere in between.

I’ll give away one of my biggest off-line secrets here: I would print up flyers for SEO services and drive all over the county looking for business parks. I’d park and find the mailboxes. You gotta figure the person checking the mail is usually the secretary or the owner of the company, so I’d post flyers on the side of the mailbox (its illegal to drop them into the mailbox itself). I’d also go into office complexes and stick them on outside restroom doors, vending machines and everywhere between.

Blog like a baws

I started this SEO blog a few years ago and our traffic went through the roof. Through. The. Roof.

Think about questions small businesses have about SEO and blog about them. Now, the leads won’t come pouring in through this method right away but overtime more and more inquires will slip through your inbox.

Wrapin’ it up

Think like a business owner and get your message in front of them, any way you can.

A lot of business owners will sign up with a small janky SEO company in hopes they are getting a good deal. The truth is smaller SEO companies and consultants are able to give far better deals because of lack of overhead and the ability to put all funds given towards the client budget. If you are just getting started out you can use this to your advantage.

Patrick Coombe is the founder and CEO of Elite Strategies Llc. Patrick takes a hands on approach to managing Elite Strategies and loves to get involved with technical projects relating to clients inbound marketing needs.